poor grades?

[Adam \'01]

And in business.......

No one gives a flying f*** what your gpa was in school.  I have bosses who went to both "better" and "worse" schools than Cornell and I'm sure got a wide range of grades.  I've seen 4.0 gpa kids from Yale and Princeton fired because of failure to get the job done.  It's all about a) who you know and b) what you did for the firm today.  

Many, many firms take the, "Show me the kid with good instincts and a solid work ethic and I'll develope his business accumen" approach.  Which is good.  I'll take the guy who can sell my product in boardrooms, over the guy who got an A in his ARME stats class.  I believe that many neccesary business skills can be learned through athletics, so in a way it almost seems much more important for future success than does craming for tests just to get a good gpa.

[Greg Berge]

Yep, the day you start your first real job out of college, all the grades you ever got become completely irrelevant to the rest of your existence, unless you temporarily climb back into the academia womb.

Had I known this as an undergrad I would have had a lot more fun with no deletrious effects to my future life.

At this point I would regard all GPAs over 3.5 as a sign of "missing the point."

[CUlater \'89]

"... [Q] all the grades you ever got become completely irrelevant to the rest of your existence... [/Q]

Not necessarily true.  From last week's New York Law Journal:

"Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher requires all prospective new lawyers to rank near the top of their law school classes. This requirement also applies to seasoned partners many years out of law school. One 47-year-old partner who recently interviewed to join Gibson Dunn's 140-lawyer New York office "had more than $7 million in highly portable business," said a legal recruiter who asked to remain unnamed. "They turned him down because of his grades in law school." Other headhunters have similar stories."

[Adam \'01]

Yes, CULater, but does that seem smart to you?

And I would argue that this case is the exception to the rule.  Not only because "law" is different than "general business" (for many reasons which we need not go into), but because most firms aren't about to do this.

[CUlater \'89]

It doesn't seem smart to me but I understand the rationale for it.  IIRC, the article goes on to discuss how there are other firms that take that approach, in part to foster a spirit of "intellectual superiority" within the firm i.e. if you work there, you work with only the brightest people, so why would you want to go anywhere else to work?  I guess it's sort of a way to create firm spirit.

In any case, I have to believe that there are other examples in other fields as well where your college performance follows you around, e.g. boutique investment banks.

[Adam \'01]

But HR satisfaction metrics indicate that the number one employee retention variable is direct manager satisfaction.  In other words, "is he/she a jerk or not."  Number two has to do with compensation.  Number three has to do with office culture (i.e.--can I wear jeans?  do we have happy hours?).  I don't give a rat's ass that my boss did well in his ethnobiology or wine tasting class 20 years ago if he's a jerk to me now.

I guess you could make the argument that people who accept offers at these "grade important" firms are the kinds of people for whom intellectual superiority is key.  Best of luck to them.

[jd212]

Graham, while I won't argue with your empirical data, I have to disagree with the generalizations you make. Although you may not know anyone with a GPA under 3.0, that doesn't mean they don't exist. Besides, how many GPAs of other people do you really know? I find it surprising to hear that 40% of grades given at Cornell are As. Too bad I missed out on all those classes. I think I got 2 As the whole time I was there. Less than 5% of my classes.  But I digress. I also disagree that the *vast* majority of athletes at Cornell are business/AEM majors. Maybe on the hockey team, maybe even the football team, but look at the rest of the sports. I'm confident you will find plenty of other majors. I don't know what your definition of vast is.  Anyway, the point is, this guy got booted off the bball team. Something tells me the sports teams have different standards than Harvard itself, because Harvard hates to kick people out for academic reasons.

[Beeeej]

We're what statisticians call "outliers," Josh.  :-D  

Beeeej

[Al DeFlorio]

For whatever historical interest it may have, Cornell used a 0-100 grading scheme through 1962-3 (maybe 1963-4--I'm too lazy to find my transcript).  At that time you needed an 85 to make Dean's List in engineering, and that would put you in something like the top 20-25%.

[jkahn]

When I graduated in '70, there was a sheet showing GPA by quartile which Cornell used to send out with grad school applications.  2.90 was the 75th percentile, i.e. top 25 % of class.  I'm not sure if that was for Cornell as a whole or the Arts school.  In Chem 107 I remember Professor Sienko telling us the curve would be 10% A's, 15% B's, 50% C's, 15% D's and 10% F's.  Times have certainly changed.

[gwm3]

This whole discussion was in response to:

[Q]Professors give C's, D's and F's more frequently than A's.[/Q]

I questioned that statement based on my personal experience.  Chris backed it up with statistics printed in the Sun.

Since then, people have been making arguments about: (1) how hard science classes are, (2) how grades don't really mean anything, and (3) how their GPA's, often many years ago, were below 3.0.

I still have yet to see any evidence, on par with Chris's stats, that Adam '04 made a true statement, about all undergratuate classes at Cornell today.


Jason, I realized after posting that I probably lumped together too many people in my comment about athlete's majors.  Yes, there are athletes in every major at Cornell (though those in the "major," spectator sports -- bball, hockey, football-- do tend to disproportionately cluster in certain disciplines).  My main point was supposed to be this: all of your arguments about how rough it was to be pre-med, etc., do not answer the real question about grading policies across the whole university.

I also did not mean to imply that there aren't people out there with GPA's below 3.0.  I know there are (and many of my friends certainly flirted with the mark).  My point was that if everyone I knew had GPA's over 3.0, then maybe C's aren't as common as Adam suggested.

[Adam \'04]

Not in the science classes. It is still that way.

[gwm3]

Adam '01 --

Like it or not, grades are unbelievably important in the legal profession.  Why that is, I'm not totally sure, but you can't get into a top firm--no matter where you go to law school--without the grades.  And, knowing some guys going to Gibson Dunn, the firms keep that pressure on until the day you graduate.  If you ever fall below their rigid cut-off, your offer is revoked.

Graham
(A 1L still waiting for his first semester grades to come back ::worry:: )

[Adam \'01]

Graham '02--

But you'll see that I separated "law" from "general business" above in my notes to CULater.  If we categorize law as one industry in American business out of the thousands, I think we'll find that it differs from the vast majority of other industries in this regard.  It's an industry (correct me if I'm wrong) that rightly relies on liberal arts scholarship more than others.  Would you agree with that?

--The Guy Sitting Next To You This Weekend At Bright    ::nut::

[gwm3]

I dunno about "liberal arts scholarship" per se.  But the law still has some pretenses to being a "learned" profession, which might begin to explain the focus on grades.

(And by the way, Adam, if I get my grades within the next couple days as expected, sitting next to me on Saturday might not be such a pleasant experience.  :-P)